nasa – A travelers odyssey

March 07, 2025

Inside the back section of Thursday’s newspaper was a USA Today article on the lunar lander that touched down early Sunday morning, March 2nd. NASA’s Janet Petro said, “This incredible achievement demonstrates how NASA and American companies are leading the way in space exploration for the benefit of all.” The Texas based Firefly Aerospace was hired by NASA to carry scientific instruments to the moon’s Earth-facing side to study its environment ahead of a manned return. The 10 instruments will be used for lunar subsurface drilling, sample collection, X-ray imaging, and dust mitigation. The craft has already sent striking images of the moon since it arrived in Lunar Orbit on February 10th. Firefly has named this class of lunar lander the Blue Ghost.

When I looked online, I found the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost, or simply Blue Ghost, is a class of lunar landers designed and manufactured by the private American company Firefly Aerospace designed to deliver small payloads to the surface of the Moon. The first Blue Ghost mission was launched January 15, 2025, at 1:11 a.m. EST and successfully landed on the Moon on March 2, 2025. The landers are named after the firefly (Phausis reticulata) known as the Blue Ghost. Firefly is the prime contractor for lunar delivery services using Blue Ghost landers which provide payload integration, launch from Earth, landing on the Moon, and mission operations. Blue Ghost has four landing legs and is designed and built to be easily adapted to each customer’s needs between the earth and moon or in the moon’s orbit (cislunar). Blue Ghost can be customized to support larger, more complex missions and is compatible with multiple launch providers. NASA awarded Firefly the first Blue Ghost lunar delivery task order in February 2021 as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

The lander’s blue ghost namesake is a species of firefly found in the eastern and central US and is common in the southern Appalachians. Adults are found in a variety of habitats, including dry and moist woods, near water, and along high, dry ridges. The male of the beetle species is all-brown and about 0.2 to 0.4 inches (6 to 9 mm) long with large eyes. The female is smaller, measuring 0.2 to 0.4 (4 to 9 mm) long. Female blue ghosts are wingless, are yellow. and remain in larval form through adulthood (paedomorphic). The females glow continuously from 4 to 9 spots on her body so they can be spotted by the males. Once a female lays her clutch of 20 to 30 eggs, she guards them until she dies in one to two weeks. The eggs hatch approximately 4 to 5 weeks after the mother dies. The larvae are extremely tiny, approximately 0.05 in (1 – 2 mm) and are bioluminescent. Unlike many firefly species in the US, the blue ghost displays a steady glow rather than the typical flashing pattern. The light emitted appears (to humans) as blueish-white when seen from a distance, but bright green when examined at close range.

THOUGHTS: The discrepancy in the observed color of the blue ghost is likely due to the Purkinje effect. While the effect is often described from the perspective of the human eye, it occurs in other animals under the same name. This effect describes the general shifting of spectral sensitivity due to pooling of rod and cone output signals as a part of dark/light adaptation. The colors seen by different animals vary greatly depending on the makeup of those rod and cone features. Humans seem to be in the middle of both color detection and acuity. This is also true about our ability to make observations and gain understanding. “Not like us” means different, not better or worse. That is true for other animals and other humans. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

September 26, 2024

Today’s NY Times feed reported on the massive pair of jets releasing from a supermassive black hole (SMBH) 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. The megastructure spans 23 million light-years in length, making these black hole jets the largest ever seen, according to new research. While Black holes gobble up nearly everything that comes close to them, a fraction of material is ejected before an object falls in, forming a jet on either side of the black hole, said Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of a new study describing the discovery published September 18 in the journal Nature. The jets have a power output equivalent to trillions of suns and are so massive that researchers have nicknamed the megastructure Porphyrion after a giant from Greek mythology. The discovery is causing astronomers to rethink their understanding of how massive black hole jets can be as well as how these giant features can affect their surroundings and the structure of the universe.

When I looked online, I found a supermassive black hole (SMBH or SBH) is a black hole more than one hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun. Solar mass (M☉) is a standard unit of mass used in astronomy equal to approximately 2×1030 kg, or the approximate mass of the Earth’s Sun. It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, including light. The discovery of SMBH was a consequence of the investigation of quasars in the mid-20th century. Nearly every large galaxy has a SMBH at its center. Active galactic nuclei, such as Seyfert galaxies and quasars, are powered by supermassive black holes. The largest SMBH is in the galaxy cluster Abell 1201 and has a mass thirty billion times that of the Sun. The SMBH at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (Sagittarius A*) has a mass four million times that of the Sun. Two supermassive black holes have been directly imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope: the black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and Sagittarius A* at the Milky Way’s center.

When sustained for mega years, high-power jets from SMBH become the largest galaxy-made structures in the Universe. “This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total. The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions” Oei said. The structure consists of a northern lobe, a northern jet, a core, a southern jet with an inner hotspot, and a southern outer hotspot with a backflow. This system demonstrates that jets can avoid destruction by magnetohydrodynamical instabilities over cosmological distances. How jets can retain such long-lived coherence is unknown at present. The haunting question is what Porphyrion is doing to the rest of the universe. Cosmologists have found that the visible features of the universe are structured in a weblike manner, with galaxies clumped in giant clusters and connected by thin filaments that span dark voids of tens to hundreds of millions of light-years. In Porphyrion’s day, this cosmic web was half the size it is now, and these jets would have been big enough to affect the overall web.

THOUGHTS: In total, the team spotted 10,000 new black hole jet pairs. Like many discoveries, the researchers were not looking for jets from the SMBH but were trying to observe the cosmic web. Research (and exploration) often mistakenly makes discoveries that expand our understanding of the universe, the Earth, and even humanity. The quest for understanding is one aspect that (we think) sets humans apart from other animals. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.